I try not to go there too often, but it's a difficult temptation: the coffee-to-go shop in Haarlem. I like the coffee here at Chess a lot, but the fresh espresso in Coffee To Go is extremely delicious. Today I bought a customer card that gives me a 10% discount.

The people working in the shop are often involved in coffee- and espresso making contests; on their website there's a short manual on making espresso's.

Today Mieke has a birthday! As always there will be nice festivities at her school with the children.

Congratulations mam! We'll celebrate our birthdays this weekend together, perhaps we can even play a game Steden & Ridders...

Tonight and yesterday night were rather relaxing compared with the last few days. Yesterday I had dinner at home for the first time in a week. I liked it very much to see a lot of people and I had a really good time, but some time for myself is nice too.

I started reading a new book, "Don't Know Much About History": very good.

I just received my confirmation as member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. The IEEE is an international engineering association, with an emphasis of computer science and engineering. It's useful to be a member, and it comes with a interesting magazine.

I had dinner in Leiden, with Rob and Kirsten in their new house.

They live in a very peaceful neighborhood in Leiden, and they are (also) looking out to a real Dutch windmill from their window. I had real fun with the cats; there was a little black one of only a few weeks old.

In the last few days I have been visiting three friends' new houses, in three different cities.

Tonight I visited Ankie and Joost in Schiedam. They have a cosy place really close to the train station, I hadn't seen it before.

They showed me the movies that they had made for their university, made in Premiere, Maya and similar tools. Quite interesting!

I went to Olga & Jelly this afternoon.

Jelly has a birthday, and I brought her a plant that somebody sold me on the market yesterday: "ah, why don't you take two, it's nice to give as a present".

It was a pleasant afternoon, and we had dinner together -- nice.

I've installed most of the tools I need to create a website in MMBase. These include Eclipse, Tomcat and a Tomcat-plugin for Eclipse. This way I can program on my desktop computer, which is easier than on the webserver.

The latest version in CVS of MMBase requires Java 1.4, which doesn't work yet on my server, so I'll stick with an older version of MMBase (1.6.5) for now. I don't think it matters too much for Guus Bosman.nl; the main changes seem to be in multi-media libraries. I'll upgrade later, when OpenBSD has a working JDK 1.4 port.

Today is a day for some experimenting with new software for this website. For a long time I wanted to change the program I'm using, and after quite some research I've decided to make a switch to MMBase. This is a Java-based system that is used for many major (Dutch) websites, such as Nu.nl, Overheid.nl, Amsterdam.nl and many broadcasting organisations (Vpro, Netwerk, NOS).

This will be a lot of (fun) work, so it will take a while before you'll see any results. In fact, I'm trying to keep the difference as small as possible; you can see a very first result here.

Why the switch? It's a good opportunity to get to know a common used (professional) program, which might be useful for my work. The program is also easier to adapt to my personal wishes, and it's simply more fun to program in Java than in PHP.

Today a new version of OpenBSD has been released. It's tempting to start installing it right away, but I prefer to work with MMBase first.

The Chess tuning yesterday was nice. We had a meeting in a room above Praag, a bar near the Grote Markt.

After the official part we went downstairs and we had drinks and dinner. We stayed long and around midnight we went to Steels for a while. Had a really fun evening.